I find it interesting that everyone has a different idea of what the worst part of the game is. Mumbles hates the underwater stuff on Manaan. Rutskarn hates the undercity. I hate the Late Game SlogTM. Josh hates the part where Rutskarn makes shitty puns when we least expect it.

While I understand the reasoning behind it, I’m not a fan of the game forcing you to change class to a force user. At the very least I’d have appreciated the option to continue putting levels into your starting class instead of having to multiclass.

it doesn’t really class it as multi-classing does it? Until you get to prestige classes anyway, Or is that only in the sequel?

I agree though, it would be quite interesting if you could just ‘force’ the game to make you a gunfighter but really you can do that yourself anyway. Sword fighting and gunshoots both use dexterity and it’s not like you have to use your force powers… Until you get to the last area anyway.

Lightsabres use the higher of strength or dexterity bonus, but strength gives you bonus damage and dexterity doesn’t.

Now, whilst dexterity does give you armour class that’s not actually particularly useful, because blaster deflection works on opposed attack rolls so if your attack bonus is good you rarely roll on armour class at all against ranged enemies, and the majority of enemies in the game use energy attacks so you can just fire off your Energy Resistance force power and ignore the first 15 points of every attack.

It’s much easier to get a defence of “enough” without dexterity, and a high strength build will be annihilating most things in melee too fast for them to significantly attack anyway, and ignoring their ranged combat due to having huge attack bonus and so deflecting everything.

Not really. If anything, investing in Str at character creation is a trap. Yeah, you’re going to be good at hitting people in melee. And with heavy armour you can become a tank. But then the only thing you’ll be good at is hitting people in melee and you’ll suck at everything else.
Also people often site the melee-damage bonus from Str, but that’s not all that significant. I suppose it can be in the early game, but when you have a lightsaber with some crystals and do flurries, you’ll be throwing more then enough damage rolls at the enemies.

And the most important thing: Str-boosting items are the most common ability-boosting-items in the game. Unless you want to min-max towards a only-hits-people-in-melee-and-does-nothing-else build, you can easily get away with leaving Str at 10 during character creation and instead invest some in Dex, or better yet into Int for those juicy skill points or in Wis or Cha for ever juicier force powers.

On the other hand, the things that add to damage don’t replace your strength bonus, they just add more to it.

The things you get to augment your defences (shields, force energy resistance, blaster deflection) replace the need for a dex bonus to armour class, or indeed armour class at all in large part, so those points spent on dex become dead later in the game.

And this isn’t even about being a minmaxed combat murder specialist (though there’s a solid argument for that because minmaxed combat murder isn’t something you can outsource to an NPC as easily as eg. computer use), it’s just about preferring a bonus which doesn’t become obsolete because later abilities and equipment augment it not replace it.

I’m not saying “put points into only strength ever” just “prefer strength to dexterity it’s more useful in the long run”.

i usually go more into strength as a fighter class jedi and never really up my wisdom, charisma or intelligence much. in 2, force powers are more useful because you get a game breaking kill everything spell if you go mage prestige class. skill points are also more useful since you can build better saber and gun parts.

I don’t think the existance of defense boosting powers & items means dex becomes obsolete. By that logic Str is obsolete from the get go as Str boosting items and Force Valor are things that exist.
Also I may be confusing this with KotOR 2, but I recall shields & energy resistance being rather useless past the mid-game, with enemies chewing through them way too fast. At which they’ll start kicking your low-AC ass. They don’t replace AC, you need either some dex or armour.

I guess what this really boils down to is build preferences. As a rule I just don’t like highly specialized builds.

It’s not just that “defence boosting powers exist” its that the defence boosts you get operate in ways that render your armour class irrelevant.

Strength boosting powers, meanwhile, are all additive with your existing strength bonus and their effect is further magnified by things like power attack or just having more attacks per round.

Blaster bolt deflection is an opposed attack roll and if you win that then the shot doesn’t even hit you, and Energy Resistance gives you damage reduction 15 against anything but physical (and most nontrivial attacks aren’t physical), which means that even if enemies hit they’ll mostly do trivial damage (you can get DR 5 vs slashing which is what most remaining physical attacks are from your arm slot as well).

Unless you’re going straight space wizard (when you want more wis and charisma anyway and can just use all your implant, hand, and belt slots for dex bonus and should be using your many space wizard powers to avoid engaging in anything as gauche as melee in the first place) then you can get more milage out of strength.

Remember as well that if you’re going to be in melee then you can stick with armour and still get all the useful force powers (push, destroy droid, cure, stun, and energy resistance), and that means you can get more AC than you’d have gotten from robes and dex bonus and keep all your melee relevant powers.

This is what I hate about RPGs, the fact that there is almost definitely going to be an “optimal” build to do things with, but you’re buried under such a diverse range of options that you’ll never be able to find it without pouring over all of the mechanics.

And when it turns out that you’ve put all your points into something that doesn’t really work right, you’ll end up getting murderized by every enemy.

Thats actually a problem with computer games,not rpgs.Because of their rigidity,if the developers dont see a problem in advance,they wont be able to fix it in time.And the more different play styles the game offers,the more chances it will have for mistakes.

The problem exists in pen and paper RPGs as well. Yes, a DM can fix it more readily than a computer can, but that doesn’t mean the problem wasn’t there and that games that don’t have that (or have it to a lesser degree) aren’t better for it.

But with a live gm you can change any rule on the fly if you notice that it is broken or unfair.You dont have to wait for those that made the original rules to change the source books.Computers dont give you that flexibility.

KotoR is especially bad about this for the final boss. Did you build around a certain party so you can cover skills, combat and force powers in equal measure and create a synergy instead of maximising your personal murderbot ability? You’re screwed. Did you build your character as a Force user who locks down and stuns enemies and destroys them piecemeal? You’re screwed. Did you not have any ranged force powers at all? You’re screwed. The endgame is intentionally balanced towards a very certain build, and if you don’t have it specifically you’re going to enjoy a final ‘battle’ involving running around throwing grenades at the boss while the Benny Hill theme sadly does *not* play in the background.

Every other party-based RPG coming out of Bioware had the courtesy of letting your entire build, namely your party, in on the final boss fight (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age, Mass Effect) or made it clear said comrades are little more than set-pieces anyway and it’s your character that matters by foreshadowing with a lot of solo-only fights (Jade Empire). KotoR and its sequel, meanwhile, did neither. You can be fine up 99% of the game and then slam your face into the brick wall for the last 1% because all the rules are suddenly thrown out.

Dex is definitely a trap because it is capped by the armor you are wearing. If a character has really high dex, their choice becomes to either 1)lose the dex bonus and wear good armor, or 2)keep the dex bonus and wear crappy armor. Having a high dex will slightly come out on top for straight Armor Class. However good armor has damage reduction and reduces the damage taken by 5/10 etc when hit. Good armor wins over dex especially since the stat points are freed up to be put somewhere else.

Huh? I don’t understand what you are trying to say as those two things do not follow.

I agree that good magics win over armor, that’s another why Dex isn’t very good. It frees up stat points to go into Wisdom/Charisma for more and better magic. Also if your character is stunned he will lose all of his Dex AC and none of his armor AC. He’ll still keep his damage reduction from armor too.

If you take Scout 5 you get an extra feat choice. Scout 4/Sen 16 gives you 9, Scout 5/Sen 15 gives you 10 for only the loss of one force power choice.

Scout 5 is the best overall for usable feat choices I think, because you get the first two levels of implant which you were probably going to take anyway plus four selections (so effectively 6 feats from 5 levels), plus Flurry is slightly preferable to Power Attack (Power Attack technically edges it out in damage but Flurry you get the full effect with one rank and increasing ranks only reduce the hit penalty, but your attack bonus is going to more than make up for that later in the game.

Scouts also have great skill progression and lots of class skills, including Repair (which you need at 17 to fully activate HK-47) and which is otherwise pretty handy throughout.

From a personal perspective, I think the whole supernatural aspect of Star Wars is dumb and I just want to continue playing as a thief or whatever.

There is plenty of room within the Star Wars setting for stories that don’t involve the force, jedi or sith. I ran a few PnP Star Wars game that didn’t have them
However this isn’t that sort of story. I mean, the lightsabers are right there on the box art.

Simple example: the non-force classes in SWTOR. I mean, there’s no new mechanics to be added to the game: we’re not asking the designers to come up with new non-force classes for people to play, just to let people continue to use existing mechanics.

The plot twist can still happen wholly independently of your actual class, which has no bearing on how the past played out. It’s your past, and can be still be as narratively relevant as it is now without it predetermining your future.

Its not just the title.Im using it as shorthand for the whole promotion of the game,the box art,and everything surrounding the game.This game is about jedi,and more specifically about you taking the role of a jedi.You dont have to play a single second of it to be 100% sure about that.

In SWTOR they made the non-jedi classes comparable in power to the jedi classes, because that is required for MMO balance. Lore-wise there is no good reason for this. The force users should be much more powerful than the scoundrels and bounty hunters. In fact, that is true even in the SWTOR lore, as every single questline on the sith side rubs in your face every other mission.

The jedi on Dantooine train you as a jedi because they don’t want to send some weak non-force user after the star maps. In fact, the best argument for NOT making you a force user is:

You fell to the dark side as a force user in your previous life, so it is a good bet that you will do it again. You are much to dangerous to learn the force!

Well, as the prequels (misguidedly, IMO) established as canon, whether or not someone is CAPABLE of using the force is innate ability, not learned. It’s not the case that any joe schmo can become a Jedi master, even with good training.

The implicit flip side is that someone with strong mitichlorians will have a natural ability to use the force to some degree, regardless of training to channel and guide it. Which might manifest in unpredictable ways. At least with training, the individual will have some way to channel that innate ability in predictable ways.

As to Revan specifically, the risk of going to the dark side when those natural abilities awaken is more an argument that Revan should have been killed in the first place.

The Jedi specifically refused to commit violence to defend the republic against the Mandalorians. Whether their argument was a good one or a bad one, it seems like it would apply to executing Revan as well, no matter how good an idea it is…

Other than that, I agree with you, except for the part where you said “mitichlorian”. In my head canon those don’t exist.

However, even in the original trilogy, before the mitichlorian heresy was commited, it was at least implied that strength in the force differed from person to person.

In New Vegas maybe. Fallout 3 may have open world mechanics, but is no less rigid plotwise. You have a fixed origin, upbringing, objective, and outcome (in both cases just an optional slightly darker version of the same outcome).

The undercity is the worst, because you get no choice. You have to do it, you have to do it now, you have to do it with the set companions. What few choices you get to make here and before won’t change the game yet, you’ve still got to run through this hoop. Most are even made moot. It’s a barrier before the part of the game where you actually get to make decisions that matter. It inhibits replays.

But it’s not as bad as Peragus/Telos in KOTOR 2. At least there are plenty of people to talk to.

I think the weakest thing about kotor 2s starting area is that it’s all just tunnels, you don’t even get to see Anything of the world until a lot later, and then it’s just Generic wilderness. I remember having a lot less to do was well although it’s been a while since I played them.

I quite like the under city because I think the rakghouls are cool, they Were basically Star Wars zombies before Star Wars zombies. They actually added to the promised land quest in the old Republic, and if you hate that quest you might like the outcome :P. It’s actually better than they say, the promised land is an automated survival bunker and it’s been broken down for centuries, so they starve to death in it while unable to escape because the upper city collapsed around them.

Yeah, I could have done without those droids to fight towards the end of that whole KotOR 2 section. And the further droids. And then the subsequent droids. Which are followed up by some droids. Who are guarding a group of droids.

(Oh, and if I get shot out of the sky one more time, I’m pretty much going to fall to the Dark Side.)

See, that’s what people hate about Taris. You can give Igear the journals(or ignore the entire quest), and the undercity people all die in the bombing. Or you can give priest-man the journals and the undercity people all starve instead. What’s the point?

But that’s a different game (and KOTOR was not ever intended as an episode but as a full story of its own). As far as KOTOR goes, none of your decisions about Taris or its people matter. Even how you treat your companions barely matters, you can still get all relevant conversations/romances out of them afterwards.

The only real question KOTOR offers on Taris is: how many XP, credits and DS/LS points can you get out of Taris before it goes away? If you could, your best move would be to sell Taris’ pants, just like Trask’s.

That’s a very meta way to play a game. I admit that I do it too, but really, if you play in character you have no idea that the sith are going to destroy everything. So the decisions matter when you make them.

In any case, in the long run, we’re all dead… so why did I bother getting out of bed this morning?

But in a replay, it’s very hard to care if you know the game is going to slap a ‘didn’t matter’ stamp on anything you do.

I’m not saying that that event was bad in a story sense or that it should be taken out. I’m saying that combined with the length of Taris, it is a hurdle that hurts replays. What I’d have liked is for Taris to either be shorter, or have more variety to explore.

I haven’t played it, but I have been sitting on this comment for two weeks now: Every. Single. Time. Josh loots a container and finds “parts”, I misread it as “pants”. In my head, Regina Cuftbert is the trouser bandit of whatever the hell this planet is called. Nobody has any trousers left.

Well, this is the very distant past of something that happened a long time ago, far, far away. Their technology hasn’t reached the level of bonnet making. The closest they’ve come is a cortosis weave face mask that blocks all vision.

With her ass it’s natural she needs to steal pants.
The undercity for the reasons already mentioned is my least liked area, though I don’t get to hate it.
In KotOR 2, the starting area, it’s too empty for all its length. Normally it starts to turn into a chore past half of it.

I’d love to see someone go back to these two games and fix the two biggest problems they have. The massive empty areas which pretty much force you to get force Speed just tolerate and the constant loading zones. My favourite world in the game is manaan but it probably has the smallest areas in the game. The underwater base section is awesome until you get to that horrible underwater section, that could definitely do with being a hell of a lot smaller. I wouldn’t want to speed up the movement too much because they tried that in kotor 2 for the spacewalking and it looked Like something from a Benny Hill sketch. it would have been more tolerable if there was something interesting to look at Like in the bioshock games or the upcoming soma, but half of it is in a blank tunnel!

Yeah it was super weird to see Bioware making such a deal of rakgoul poisoning only to find out that, in the meta-game, once you were infected it was just a poison effect nothing more. They do the same thing in SWOTOR although they do bother giving an explanation for it even if it’s kinda contrived. Apparently your character in that game is one of the few people immune to rakgoul infection.

It’d be real awkward if they let you do the whole screwing up Zaalbar’s name during the big quest that revolves around him. At the end he could be thanking you for helping him and you just have the option of saying “Sure, I’d do anything for a friend like you Zanzibar!” Coupled with the fact that when I played the game Zaalbar was basically just along for the ride it’d be a double scoop of awkward.

Really?You want to play a game about jedi,and you dont want to be a jedi?Then you complain that the game about jedi makes you into a jedi?Whats next?You are going to complain that in F1 2015 you have to drive a formula 1 instead of porsche boxster?Or that in fifa you have to play football instead of basketball?

Agreed, the issue with Mass Effect 2 wasn’t so much a problem with being forced to follow the plot, more that the plot was a bit nonsensical. Not having absolute freedom is part and parcel of the (sub) genre. Being forced to be dumb, less so.

The game can be *about* jedi without requiring you to *be* a jedi. If I wanted to be a jedi, I would have started the game as a jedi class, but since that isn’t an option, it is not at all unreasonable to assume that do not *have* to be a jedi.

For some of us, Star Wars is not being a laser sword wielding space-mage. Some of want to be “Han Solo” – the guy who flies the cool spaceship and has all sorts of wacky adventures.

True,this game can be about jedi without being a jedi.But its not.In fact,one of the biggest criticisms it had back in the day was that you dont get to be jedi soon enough.Because it was marketed as a game where you get to be a jedi.

In fact,the first thing that surprised me when I got to play it years after it came out was that you start as not a jedi,seeing how everything I saw about the game suggested that you get to be a jedi.

It is not unreasonable to assume that in star wars setting you can be something else.It is unreasonable to assume that in this star wars game you get to be something else for long.

I honestly don’t remember what the marketing surrounding the game was like. I do know that the “you are not a jedi” in the beginning caught me off guard both the first time I played the game and when I replayed it recently.

At least this game doesn’t take a previously established character and railroad them against every brain cell they have. Shepard working for Evil McLoony Corp made no sense. What happens on Dantooine does.

It is a story about Jedi, Lucasarts had already had to cave to popular demand for lightsabres in Dark Forces (turning it into the Jedi Knight series) and the twist wouldn’t work if the dantooine thing didn’t happen. The majority of players were going to demand lightsabres anyway.

At some point, CRPGs have to set boundaries for the story they’re going to tell; they can’t account for everything. And I’d rather have a story that defines the player character for me than one that won’t let their backstory impact the game story at all.

Plus you have the option of continuing to just use blasters and grenades if you like. Some shops actually sell some decent upgradeable guns for $ridiculous.

If the only change was that after the training you could choose which class to take levels in (even if forced to take a level of Jedi, whatever), I’d feel a bit better about it. Fulfils the plot requirement while still allowing the freedom of choosing your own progression.

But I dont want to play as any of those classes,I want to play as a fantasy bard.And I dont want any of those weapons and feats,I want my weapon to be the nuke launcher from fallout 3 with a feat to have it be a mirv.This game should also let me open up a wormhole to the real world so I can do fisticuffs with Uwe Boll.If it cant deliver all those trivial things then it sucks.

But they shouldve implemented a bard instead of one of these classes,because I want to play a bard.Not a space bard,a fantasy bard with a wooden lute,only in space.Because wanting that from this game makes perfect sense.

I can understand where Humanoid is coming from. The game asks you to pick a class, get comfortable with it, and then changes you into a Jedi. It’s less like wanting the nuke launcher from Fallout 3 and more like wanting to just keep doing what they’re already doing and invested in.

I don’t see it as a flaw in the game, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to act like people are crazy if they enjoy being a scoundrel.

Im not saying that its crazy if you enjoy one of these classes more than the other.Im saying that its crazy to say the flaw of this game is that its not a sandbox game.

EDIT:Saying that the transition was done poorly,I can get.Saying that you get to play too long as a non jedi I can get as well.Or that jedi classes arent as good or as diverse.Or that the story is too disjointed.Or anything like that.

But to say that the game should offer you to keep the class simply because of choice?Thats what I think is crazy.

I think this could have been avoided if the Jedi and non Jedi classes mapped to each other better.

For example, Soldier and Guardian are fine. Guardians are just soldiers with force powers and lightsabre proficiency. Being forced to make that switch just gives you more options you can elect to not ever use.

Scout vs Sentinel is a bit more iffy, but they’re still generally similar. They’re the in between mix for HP, FP and skills, with some passive resilience buffs. It’s just that not all their class skills match up for some stupid reason. But you can basically be a 90% of a scout that chooses not to use the force.

But scoundrel vs councillor is the big problem. Backstabbing skill monkeys don’t get to keep being their class when the switch happens, their apparent matching jedi class is the wizard (and none of the other jedi classes truly offer the rogue experience either).

And I can see now why people don’t like not getting to play the rogue even though the game pretends to give that option at the start. That was bad form by the game.

Eh, I think it’s more if the abilities didn’t seem so arbitrarily locked away that you’d have a better time. The system as is makes sense to anyone with a background in the DnD, but isn’t presented as well to someone new to the system.

Take, for example, backstab. In practice, this a defining class skill of rogues and is where they get a lot of their prowess in pure battles. On paper, it’s seen as “I’m a lvl x rogue, so I do y amount of backstab”. In KOTOR though, it’s presented similarly to any other feat.

For a player that uses backstab a lot in their strategy, taking backstab would help plenty, possibly even more than taking a new force ability. Because the game (rightfully) says that because you’re a Jedi now, you only continue to be a Jedi, the lockout of more backstab feels frustrating.

Though, yes. Presenting a ton of options that seem like they might be useful or supported that don’t pan out is rather frustrating. You can’t do the rogueish playstyle, nor did stealth seem like a good idea either, even though there are mechanics for both.

I actually vastly preferred the NWN-style voice acting. A few lines of voiced intro dialogue were all you needed to set the voice for the rest of the text in your head, which meant less time and money needed to be spent on actors and you could put some decently long branching conversations in there.

And when the modding community comes along, it’s not as jarring to not have everybody be silent. Having the entire game be voiced raises the bar for interesting story-based mods too high – look at Oblivion and the basic “sword model cribbed from some JRPG” mods that you got, compared to some of the really awesome Morrowind mods.

The gate guard’s actually voiced by Crispin Freeman. In fact, I don’t think Troy Baker was working in video games at the time of KOTOR: He was likely still in anime.

My least favourite level in the game’s a two way tie between the Undercity (Drab, boring, no new likeable characters aside from Zaalbar and Mission) and the Underwater crap in Manaan. It didn’t exactly motivate me to… well, when we get there I’ll say.

Yeah, Troy Baker’s first non-anime-related video game role seems to be two years after this in 2005, with Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, where he played the main character Sgt. Matt Baker.
Which in retrospect now seems obvious to me it was him. Though I wouldn’t have heard him before when I initially played it.

I really hope you’re single. Because jokes like this are incredibly insulting to your spouse. Marriage isn’t a trap or a punishment. If you think it is, don’t get married. And if you’re not married, please refrain from insulting my various very happy married friends.

Well then,I should introduced you to my father who told me that joke,some 15 years ago,while still remaining happily married to my mother after that.Oh,and do you want to hear the plethora of marriage jokes my mother told me,while remaining happily married to my father?

Just because you cannot think of an “insulting” joke that doesnt come from malice,dont assume others cant as well.Or do you honestly think that Mumbles resents the rest of the cast because she constantly calls them nerds and dorks?

With jokes, intent is kind of meaningless. Sure, it’s fine to make jokes YOU and people close to you know are harmless fun, but random people getting het up about them isn’t all that unreasonable since they can’t read your mind or anything.

The worst part? Eh, it’s probably the unnatural dialogue. That, coupled with the awkward character animations, makes me feel a bit like I’m playing dolls. I prefer this game to the sequel, but I will grant that the sequel has better dialogue.

Of course, that’s my opinion after many, many replays. (So I guess it can’t be that bad.) If you had asked me in 2003, I would have told you that the worst part was draw-distance issues. When I installed the game for the very first time, my graphics card barely met the minimum spec and the installer only grudgingly let me play the game. I found out why for the first time in the Undercity, which is the first area in the game featuring some really long draw distances. The game slows down tremendously in these situations and actually stops responding to your input. If you’re lucky, it will come to its senses after a couple of minutes when your character has run across the level and pressed her nose to a wall so that it doesn’t have to draw so much any more.

I’m pretty sure that the designers and programmers were aware of the issue, too. That would explain why, say, the path from the Vulkar base to the Sith-controlled elevator in the Lower City has a bit of an S-curve to it. On the other hand, there’s Dantooine. The Under City is only bad in one or two spots. Dantooine is just terrible all over, though the big, sort of circular area immediately south of the ruins is the worst. (And it’s filled with enemies, too!) To make Dantooine playable, I used to have to drop the texture quality, turn off grass and shadows, and pray. It worked, mostly, but made the game a lot less nice to look at. Fortunately, none of the other planets are all better and I could put the settings back to normal.

The good news is that with a sufficiently powerful computer the draw distance problem largely goes away. I recently started a new game because of Spoiler Warning and I didn’t have draw-distance problems at all. (Instead, I had weird grass-shadow interaction problems when I stepped out of the elevator in the Undercity. The KotOR engine apparently does not like Intel graphics. The sequel is even worse, because it frequently makes object textures semi-transparent. I should not be able to see through vibroblades, dammit.)

It’s been so long that I don’t really remember what was my most disliked part of KotOR! I do remember the really slow underwater sequence on Manaan, and it was a bit annoying, but at the same time, the atmosphere of that segment was just so awesome (and somewhat eerie) that I was able to overlook it.

On voiced versus silent protagonists: Maybe it’s just me, but I VASTLY prefer silent protagonists when it comes to RPGs. They allow me to really immerse myself in my character and imagine that they are saying what I really want them to say. The trouble with ME/DA’s style of dialogue is that the dialogue wheels don’t always give a real indication of what your character is about to say. For instance, you could pick an option saying “You’re a slaver?” with the idea that your character is disbelieving, because the guy totally doesn’t look like it. But instead, Shepard et. al. will say it in a really angry, hostile tone that makes me go, “What? That’s totally not how I wanted to say it at all!” (And not to mention the dozens of dialogue options that are so ambiguous it’s hard to tell what you’ll end up saying.)

End result, Shepard/Hawke/Geralt etc. never truly feel like MY characters. They actually each have their own distinct personality that’s independent of what you’re trying to roleplay as. As such, I can never play those games without feeling that they’re simply actors who are saying the lines I give them, but without my intent or inflection.

P.S. “Do it for the XP!” is a good way to justify doing good deeds even on an evil playthrough. XD

I imagine the evil playthrough option is to convince him to let you through the gate, then just run past the guy being attacked. You can come back later to finish it off for the xp. It would fit in line with how the rest of the sith are treating this planet.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making the player just be the decision pilot to a premade character so long as they’re honest about it. They don’t try to trick you into thinking that Geralt is purely your creation, which makes it fine.

Shepard on the other hand, is always a badass soldier who is totally obsessed with the Reapers and has a bad habit of making decisions without consulting superiors, and there’s nothing you can do to change that, no matter what name, face, hairstyle, or romantic partner you give him/her.

Agreed. I mean, in the Witcher series there’s basically no illusions at all that you’re playing someone else’s character. It’s like playing a Batman game; there’s a certain accepted boundary on his actions because it’s BATMAN. But Shepard or Hawke is supposed to be your self-insert copy, and most of the time you’re only vaguely guiding them in what they say or do. When you pick a conversation option, it will often continue on for several lines before you actually get to make another choice.

Since you are going to perform the same action no matter your choice, the writer are forced to give you a template. I think that one of the step to better appreciate the Bioware games is to recognize and accept that template: the Warden will always want to stop the Blight above all, but I am given some liberty in the ways it will do that. Playing a non Blight obsessed Warden will not work. Playing a Shepard who will refuse a free ship with its crew to fight the Reaper will not even be suggested.

And another second step is that the companions are not all supposed to be likeable: Tali is a pure nerd bait, but you are supposed to find Miranda arrogant.

You don’t get T3 until later as mentioned above. What Josh could have done is buy a different droid at the same shop, but it would’ve broken down on the way out (another call back to A New Hope among many in the whole Taris section).

Maybe because regular nerds don’t care what a word is supposed to sound like when they first read it. Or any other reasons for these kind of things there are a lot. Anyway let’s just agree to disagree (even though I do pronounce it Twee-Lek myself).

I think my least favorite part is the Rakatan planet. By this point, the story is almost over, we know almost everything we need to, and the game puts up this unnecessary barrier to our progress. Helping out one tribe or the other just feels like a waste of time, like it doesn’t serve any story or gameplay purpose. I’ve played the whole game, I’m at the climax, so unless we’ve got something important to do (like the Vigil conversation in Mass Effect), let’s just keep moving forward.

Least favourite part of KotOR has got to be the Undercity. Sure, the Late Game Slog is annoying and doesn’t really make that much sense for a game like this, but at least it’s not that hard. The Undercity, on the other hand, feels just as much like a slog as the Late Game, but combat is much harder in the beginning (albeit, this might have something to do with purposefully not leveling, but even if you do play it “right” it’s still not easy). The Undercity is just fight after fight after fight after fight, and the story doesn’t really pick up again for at least an hour or two.

Having played both KotOR 1 and KotOR 2 recently and watching you play it again, I must say that I find the whole planet Taris incredibly boring, tedious, and storywise bordering on standard fantasy-RPG quest sillyness. Much of it has to do with your characters being still relatively weak (failing to hit the target while standing right in front of them, Morrowind-like), and their personal quests, which are mostly interesting and varied, being triggered later in the game. It doesn’t help that the game has approximately five different low-texture generic-looking human NPCs who in most cases have nothing particulary interesting to say other than giving you moral choices like “Help us against bounty hunters/racists/criminal underground organisations/find a cure for the Rakghoul disease, or be a dick for no other reason than to gain DS points”. (Fortunately, KotOR2 is MUCH better in regards to morally ambiguous decisions.) But it doesn’t matter anyway, because Taris will be destroyed by Malak’s fleet rendering all your decisions pointless.

As soon as you leave Taris, there will be more interesing quests, characters and places.

You’re right, of course, but I prefer to imagine I accomplished something that lasts after I put a considerable amount of time in it. And if it doesn’t, the writers could at least attempt to achieve something more ambitious than demonstrating how stupidly evil Malak is.

Technically true, but I find that if the game managed to immerse me (and good games should), having the game declare my actions null and void feels very different than having me choosing to simply never look back.

I don’t think what happens was bad for the story. Your character doesn’t see it coming, so there is no in game reason to make decisions based on it, and the even does help establish a major NPC. But it does make replaying Taris in later playthroughs quite bit less interesting.

I’m playing the game at the moment to go along with the show, and that part is really crazy to me. Everything you do on Taris is negated by the orbital razing of the planet: Every person you helped, every quest you completed, every sympathetic NPC you consoled. It makes replays of the game very weird.

Worse, once you get the Ebon Hawk under your control, do you try to evacuate some of the people from Davik’s estate? Maybe some of those slaves who aren’t responsible for being there? Nope! Grab your friends and head off for adventure! Don’t worry your head about Taris, you won’t remember any of the NPCs anyhow!

Can we put a stop to saying most darkside options are simply for the “EVUL” at least at this point in the game. Most evil actions you take are for the money or because it would be risky to help. And it may be shortsighted and nakedly evil but they remain a logical reasons.

Taris is the worst part of KotOR. All of it. It’s long, irritating, gives you the fewest party members to play with and if you level up to actually deal properly with the content then you gimp yourself later on. Yay?

The entire Taris chapter is my least favorite part of KotOR. By far. It takes hours, and, in a game where playing a Jedi was part of the draw, you don’t get to do anything with lightsabers or the force until Bastila finally appears on-stage. It also feels kind of awkward that something like half your party is introduced, here.

For game play it is the undercity, while for non-game play it is those ****ing underwater sections where they make you walk really far, really slowly. I only beat this game once w/o cheating because after you try turbo mode the game is unplayable w/o it.

… the end game slog, I think – assuming Shamus means the part where the enemies are just constantly respawning. I found that to be tedious, especially since I enjoy clearing a room out and going at my own pace. When I have to rush just to get past the next respawning of the mooks, it feels intensely unsatisfying to me.

I actually liked most of the other places pretty well, honestly. The Undercity was kind of a (figurative) breath of fresh air for me, since previous to that you went through two areas that were very talky with only the odd fight here or there – by the time I got past the camp at the start of the Undercity, I was really ready for a nice, sizable dungeon.

And I LOVED Manaan. I can get, I suppose, that people wouldn’t like the slow underwater walking bits, but I found the whole area to be very atmospheric and often fairly spooky, it ticked off all the right points for me, psychologically and emotionally speaking. Also loved the above-water bits too… I just generally loved Manaan.

I liked Taris. I felt it was pretty neat when playing through it the first time. It’s just that if you ever want to play through the game again, you have to do all of it over again, and through it all, if you’re one of those min/maxers, you have to go without leveling up at all.

Then the sequel has the same problem with Peragus, except they tried to minimize the drag by making sure there’s nobody to talk to and no side quests to wade through to get through, which makes things even more boring when you replay it. Good thing there’smods for those.

I have a bit of a grudge against the sequel because getting your lightsaber takes freaking forever. The absolute fastest you can get it is the third place you go, so my Jedi Guardian got all the way to level twelve before then.

Yes, I could have gone the Jedi Jesus route, but I wanted a lightsaber.

I can get the frustration with it, but I quite liked earning my lightsaber. It made it feel like your first lightsaber was a big deal and (to me) it still felt like there was plenty of game after you get it. By the end game you’re swamped in lightsabers

I generally agree with this, but it does mean that if you have put points into dexterity instead of strength you need to either get weapon finesse for vibroswords (which is a separate skill from finesse for sabres in KOTOR 2) or suffer with a crappy to-hit for the first three planets.

There is some truth in it.But they arent wrong when it comes to this.Even I sometimes prefer to hear everything instead of read it,and I like old games where everything is text,which makes me the minority.

Personally, I often find myself skipping through voiced dialogue, so I’m perfectly happy with it being used sparingly. Also, some games (I’m particularly thinking of Fire Emblem Awakening and Persona Q, but I’m sure there have been others) have compromised by giving major character a bunch of 1-4 word voiced phrases that get played alongside a text line to give a sense of tone. For instance, the FE player character says “Hmmm” alongside lines where they’re starting to form a plan. Then major conversations may be fully voiced.

I would respect this stance more if most dialogue in video games weren’t:

A.) Unnecessary

B.) Embarrasing and

C.) Stupid.

If what video game characters actually said anything worth listening to, that would be one thing. But so much game dialogue is just meaningless word-flap that doesn’t enrich the world or advance any story. Who in their right mind cares what nameless NPC from Podunk, Middle of Nowhere Town thinks about dragons or whatever? Is that something that really needed having a dude sit down in a booth and read that line eigthy times to get the perfect droning sound? It blows my mind when people write lines for characters that do not need to be read or heard, ever, that does not affect anything at all, and people believe that makes a game more “immersive”.

I think this is one of those things that people tell themselves they want, because they’ve been so BS’d by thinking games need to be more “cinematic” and “like movies”. Or the US education system is so screwed up that people will do anything to avoid reading.

Its not unnecessary.It does help you hear how the npc sounds like when you read their lines.But I think the best solution would be to have only the first few lines of dialogue voiced,just so you could continue imagining how they talk while you read their lines.I usually read the lines in front of the npc,and skip them,but I still let them finish the first couple of sentences to get a feel of them.

I think this is one of those things that people tell themselves they want, because they've been so BS'd by thinking games need to be more “cinematic” and “like movies”. Or the US education system is so screwed up that people will do anything to avoid reading.

Thats a bit pretentious.Just because you like it one way,doesnt mean others are fooling themselves into liking it the other way.

Also,one huge problem with voice acting and why it usually sounds stupid is precisely because its not cinematic.Plenty of developers give no direction to the voice actors,and you end up with flat readings(dinklebot is the best(worst)example of this).And because its a relatively new development,writers write the lines as if they are writing a book,never thinking how they would sound when read.

It depends on the game. Action games are greatly enhanced by voice acting because asking the player to pause and read breaks the flow (compare Tie Fighter to the original X-wing).

When a wall of text stands in the player’s way and the game halts to let them read anyway, then no voice acting can actually be better (reading is faster than most voice actors speak).

But as for why the developers are doing it? Not having VA would make the game look cheaper and less technologically sophisticated when compared with the competition. Same reason the graphics bleeding edge is still a thing, even though most people would rather just have a box that can keep playing the newest games for more than a year.

The writing in this game is just… not good. It is incredible just how heavy-handed it can be, with most NPCs just endlessly exposition-dumping on the player at the slightest provocation. No human being ever talks like this, and the voice acting usually can’t keep up and sell it either.

There are some nice moments for sure, like some of your companions, some of the critical path scenes, and there are times when the story and atmosphere all come together, but man… I am happy you guys are playing the game so I don’t have to. ;)

I do wonder if this is a result of BioWare’s legacy with Baldur’s Gate and more text-driven games. What works well in a non-voiced text interface does not scale to a more cinematic, fully-voiced context. It seems like it took up until Mass Effect for them to really get the hang of writing dialog that started to approach something that a real (well, movie) person might actually deliver.

Here’s something I noticed about KOTOR. Maybe everyone knows this, but it’s still useful. Once you have Force Speed, cast it right before going through a level transition. It’ll stay active a lot longer than otherwise. Very useful.

I find all of taris to be the worst. I feel like (I could be wrong and the game may have tricked me into this feeling) the game opens up a lot after you get off world and finish your jedi training. You can pick what world you go to and who you bring with you and I like that sense of wonder and exploration of where to go.

Tatooine was the point where I actually bounced off the game and have not gone back yet, so I’m guessing that’s my least favourite part. I don’t know if I was wandering around the map border or something, but I just got lots of random encounters with Tusken raiders completely out of the blue, one of which killed me because I wasn’t careful enough. I switched it off thinking I’d come back to it, and never have again.

Kashyyk made 14-year old me hate wookiees and their accursed, obtuse, empty, vicious elevator-based society. Which traps you in a dank meme pit with some douchebag. And has you wandering a murky maze fighting giant ants for hours. And hides the game’s best-written character behind a tedious fetch/kill things MMO quest. And their sound files of constant whining and growling.

I played Neverwinter Nights before this, and all I saw of this game at first was just a more competent, console-y version of that game with all the cool modification bits crowbarred out and replaced with endless cutscenes and silliness. It even has the same characters, with Carth replacing Pavel(though unlime Pavel he’s no quitter who leaves the monster killing business just because his life fell apart and he lost everything he cared for), Bastila replacing Aribeth de Tylmerande, and all your party basically getting redux versions of the Neverwinter henchfolk. Even the same structure, where the planets correspond pretty closly to the towns from NWN, and the Star Maps with the Words of Power.

For the longest time, I was sure that the best Star Wars game was Jedi Outcast because of how closely it nailed the central thesis of the movies(namely that those noname henchbaddies can go hang and the personal journey from random scrapper to would-be slightly murderous saint), while KOTOR was just this pile of reheated BioWare ideas with an expensive license on top and loads of worthless jabber.It’s only afterwards, long afterwards, that I’ve started to realize all the good parts it does have.

I’ve just confirmed something I always suspected about the pod race. It doesn’t matter what you do, the first run will be improved by a Black Vulkar pilot. So if you want to make it easy, just make a crappy first try, just not so much it’s slower than the initial time you have to beat (38 secs and something) and then the second will be easier.

I’ve got killed in the fight after without a save so I’ve had to make it three times. In the first run I made 30.?? and it got improved, in the second 27.??. In the second try I made 28.?? first and it was improved, then 26.?? and won. In the third I made a 25.89 and it got improved to 25.59 so I had to make a 24.95 in the second race to win it.

Just finished Taris on my first playthrough of SWTOR. Someone had mentioned that canonically in SWTOR those folks died on the way to the promised land, but technically they made it. You find some recordings made by those folks in the promised land. It sounds like they were the only survivors of Taris getting Malakked. The recordings indicate they lasted multiple generations in their new home, but eventually succumbed to ghoul attacks and the toxic, post-apocalyptic environment. So, still not a happy ending, but they did make it there.

Just waiting for the “Well… that was carthartic!” comment. We know it’s coming.

Also, love the comparative source analysis of the pronunciation of “Twi’lek.”

Also, Tolkien feels like the progenitor of modern fantasy because he codified the bulk of western mythology in a non-religious context. The Old Gods of myth still hold sway on fantasy, and if Tolkien appears the origin, it is to the credit of his broad grasp of his sources.

For me, the worst part was where you get the underwater diving suit, and move super slowly… or was that in KOTOR II?

The worst part is definitely that one point where the game crashes every time you try to go through that one door and then when it finally works the textures bug out and the sky is filled with flickering shapes that shouldn’t be there.

I started playing for the first time recently since I’d been meaning to get around to this game for years and I wanted to have some more context for the Spoiler Warning series but I’m starting to fall behind just because of how often the game crashes. It seems like every time it tries to play a cutscene there’s about a 50% chance that it’ll silently crash to desktop instead. The end of Taris where you have to get through multiple consecutive cutscenes and a stupid turret section, all without being able to save, almost made me give up on the game.